February 12, 2016 A comprehensive research article published in Science Advances found that water scarcity is actually worse than first thought. The authors found that fully two-thirds of the global population suffer severe water scarcity at least 1 month per year, and nearly half of them live in India and … Continue reading
Category Archives: Drought
Global Electricity Output May Drop Due To Climate Change
January 4, 2016 Climate change impacts on rivers and streams may substantially reduce electricity production capacity around the world. Particularly vulnerable are the United States, southern South America, southern Africa, central and southern Europe, Southeast Asia and southern Australia. A new study by the International Institute For Applied Systems Analysis in … Continue reading
COP21 And The Distribution Of Wealth
January 1, 2016 Background COP21 is a pragmatic face-saving agreement for politicians, nothing more. Essentially, signatory nations have agreed only to commit individually and severally to maximum annual carbon emissions. Reporting the results is mandatory, but unlike global lending institutions that routinely force helpless quasi-bankrupt governments into painful austerity programs … Continue reading
World’s Largest Aquifers Beyond Tipping Point
June 16, 2015 An informative, pivotal article explains how some of the largest aquifers on Earth are being depleted. This is “fossil” water, stored naturally underground over hundreds or thousands of years. Some of the aquifers are in deserts with little or no precipitation to offset their high use. The … Continue reading
California Needs 42 Cubic Km of Water
December 16, 2014 RELEASE 14-333 NASA Analysis: 11 Trillion Gallons to Replenish California Drought Losses It will take about 11 trillion gallons of water (42 cubic kilometers) — around 1.5 times the maximum volume of the largest U.S. reservoir — to recover from California’s continuing drought, according to a new … Continue reading
Sao Paulo’s Water Crisis
December 9, 2014 Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million people, has water for 60 days. Whether the cause is global warming, deforestation in the Amazon, or something else is irrelevant. The point is that the city depends on rainfall to replenish its reservoirs. Well, it’s not raining, and there’s … Continue reading
Climate Change & Lima, Peru 2014
December 2, 2014 The ongoing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (December 1 through 12, 2014) in Lima must not fail to slow, and eventually halt, the use of fossil fuels and nuclear energy to generate electricity. That would greatly reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the … Continue reading
The Conquest of Drought
Speaking at Brookings on the economics of climate change, Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew remarked that “the cost of inaction or delay is far greater than the cost of action.” The fact of the matter is that there is no national or international consensus among leaders on what, if … Continue reading
Consequences of Climate Change Assessment by the U.S. Department of Agriculture
Excerpted from the full report August 2012 Executive Summary The 2010 Resources Planning Act (RPA) Assessment is the fifth report prepared in response to the mandate in the 1974 Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act (Public Law 93–378, 88 Stat 475, as amended). This report summarizes findings about the … Continue reading
The Dying Aral Sea
The Independent September 30, 2014 It was once the fourth largest lake in the world, but what used to be an expanse of water in the basin of the Kyzylkum Desert now lies almost completely dry. The Aral Sea has been retreating over the last half-century since a massive Soviet … Continue reading